Video Highlights:
00:25 – Standard automatic awnings
00:40 – How automatic awnings work
01:01 – Spring roller awnings
01:52 – Two choices of operating a spring roller
02:08 – Mesh spring roller awnings
02:50 – Mesh Spring roller’s advanced gearing crank operation
03:37 – Fixed guide awnings
04:05 – Fixed guide operation
05:30 – Folding arm awnings
05:59 – Folding arm awnings operation options
Transcription
Hi I’m Jason from the company, Blockout Blinds and I hope you’re having a fantastic day.
Today, I’m here to talk to you about the different types of awnings and where you would use them and in what situations.
1. Standard Automatic Awning
Let’s have a look at the first picture we have here and this is a picture of your standard, everyday, automatic awning. These have been around for a long time and they haven’t changed too much over the years. These are the awnings that we sell the most of and they’re really designed to go on your window in a situation where you can either reach it to put it up or down or in a situation where it’s not too high and you can operate it and put it up and down with a pole. That’s the main way you would operate those.
2. Spring Roller Awning
The second type of awning we have are called a spring roller. What this pretty much are is they are exactly the same with automatic awning except they no longer have the guides running up and down the sides. So, what these do is they roll down, and you clip them into clips on the ground to hold them into position. As you can see in this picture, there’s 3 or 4 mesh charcoal blinds in between the poles of a pergola, and so what we do there is we pull the blind down, we clip it on the left, clip it on the right and that will hold it into position. So you might want to use these in situations where you don’t want to have the guides because they might look ugly or there may simply not be a place to put the guides.
So they can be operated in two ways as well. So the one you see there is a clip-down, it is operated by a string. So once you unclip it, the spring will lift the blind up. If you let go of the blind suddenly, it would zip up quite quickly.
On this next picture here, you can see sort of the heritage red, mesh spring rollers. Now these are on a sort of circular window and because there was nowhere in the frame to put the guides that you put into a normal auto awning, here we have to do it with spring rollers. Once again, they’re operated by a spring and they’re simply pulled down and clipped at the bottom. This customer was not particularly concerned about putting them up and down to regularly they mainly wanted to put them down, leave them down because the sun was absolutely killing them.
You can move on to this next picture here. You’ll see this green mesh spring roller awnings, except these ones are not operated by a spring. These have a more advanced gearing crank operation. What you’ll see on the table there is a long white aluminium rod and that is used to reach up to the gearing crank which you can see in the middle of the two blinds. So the way it works, you hook the crank on, you would wind the blind down, clip it in, then wind it up slightly to put a bit of tension back into the blind. The beauty of these is that they’re much easier to operate and because they’re not spring controlled, once you undo the clips at the bottom, it doesn’t spring up, you can just wind it up manually. So really good for those people that you know, who don’t want to muck around trying to hold a blind while they put the clips at the bottom. Also, it’s just a much better, much, much better finish.
3. Fixed Guide Awning
The next type of awning we have is called the Fixed Guide. In this picture here, you can see 4 charcoal canvas awnings. The two at the bottom are your normal, automatic awnings and the 2 at the top are your Fixed Guides. Now if they are normal, automatic awning on the top, it will be way too high to reach up with a pole and operate. Even if you could reach with a pole, you wouldn’t have enough leverage on the pole to operate them correctly.
So a fixed guide is called a Fixed Guide because it has 2 guides down the side that are fixed into the position and the bottom rail of the awning has 2 runners that run up and down the guide. The blind has a spring inside which is always trying to lift the blind up so hence when we pull the blind down, we need a way of keeping it down. So these ones here I believe are motorised, we can motorise the fixed guide ones. It will be on this next photo here, you’ll see a striped awning halfway through installation on top of the second storey of the home. Now of course, because you have a pitch roof below, it’s a bit impossible to reach up and control it. So if you look closely, this one has a pulley in the centre of the blind and the way it is operated is by a rope connecting from the middle of the blind, it runs down to the pulley, runs back inside underneath the window sill into the home. So when you’re inside, you pull in the rope and tie it off and that leaves the blind up and down. So Fixed Guides are really only used on second storey’s or situations where you visibly can’t access the blind. We tend to sell more Fixed Guides as motorised as well, a lot of people don’t like the ropes. So motorisation gets rid of the ropes and just more of a better operation.
4. Folding Arm Awnings
On this last picture here, you’ll see that we have a Folding Arm awning. Unlike the other awnings, the other 3 types of awnings are designed to go on your window and cover it completely and mainly to block the sun out directly from the window where the Folding Arm awning is designed more like a roof. Something that you can pull out, and you might sit underneath it on a table. So Folding Arm awnings have a different functionality to the other three. Once again, they can be motorised or manually controlled and they are a fantastic product.
So there you have it, that’s the four main types of awnings. Most people couldn’t realise what they are but now you do, you’re informed. Now when you’re ready to buy your awnings, you pretty much know exactly which type is required in your home.
So thanks for listening and until next time.
